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Topic: Asian honey bees destroyed. (Read 819 times)

Apparently 300 asian bees were discovered. Let us hope the rest of the colony did not make it to Townsville after being disturbed. The last asian bees to come to Australia amazingly did not host varroa. Varroa is endemic in PNG and I'll look out for the biosecurity report after they have tested these bees.

I used to live in Darwin, they were pretty good up there, they used to pick up a colony every so often, bit easier when there is only one real port in the whole territory. QLD well that's a different story.....beautify one day, full of feisty verroa mite the next.

not a good development.....

perhaps if the government weren't suck a bunch of tight a55's they might not have withdrawn the funding for the $5 million eradication program on the basis that the bee was “ineradicable”.

The Asian bee poses a significant threat to the Australian environment and economy for a number of reasons. Asian bees do not produce surplus honey and cannot be managed in commercial hives. Asian bees compete with native birds and small mammals such as possums and bats for nesting sites, pollen and nectar, and they are a natural host to the Varroa mite,

Which would vitally wipe out honey bee populations in Australia, jeopardize the $80 million beekeeping industry, the loss of pollination which would threaten horticultural and pasture crops, potentially leading to the loss of 20,000 full-time jobs and economic losses upwards of $6 billion.

It’s clear that the Asian bee incursion is a serious issue.

So why has the government withdrawn the funding from the eradication program?

This question was the focus of a Senate inquiry in March, and the outcome from the inquiry is a tale of bureaucratic farce.

The CSIRO’s pre-eminent Asian bee expert was mysteriously "left off" a mailing list (how bout that?), which meant that the CSIRO wasn’t consulted on key issues, and the decision that the Asian bee was ineradicable was made on the basis of "questionable science".

its $5 million for goodness sake....they spend more that that on little Johnny's Trackie daks

Oz,I am glad they found DEAD varroa on those bees. We are both a similar distance to Townsville. I want to leave off dealing with varroa for as long as possible!

Eco,I can't see any sense in stopping the eradication program, and surely if the cerana are difficult to find, that calls for more funds not less. But the government probably needs the dough for more important things like their pay rises. I just see that beekeepers will have to do their own eradication in a suitable radius so their own bees will not have competition for resources. The Cairns bees miraculously did not host Varroa, so they probably will be more of a competition and pest problem.

There's something fishy about the expert not being consulted, for sure. Is that Denis Anderson, the one we'll all be consulting if/when we get varroa here?